Fine Motor Skills That Support Early Education

Good use of fine motor skills contributes to early school success. Fine motor adeptness involves the smaller muscle groups throughout the body—for example, muscles in the hand and fingers must work in unison to strengthen drawing and writing. Small muscles in the throat, tongue and lips must work together for clear speaking and singing. Pronunciation, coloring, printing, cutting, and pasting are some critical skills for staying on grade level during a child’s early years of school.

Between the ages of 4 and 6, help your child learn to master these fine motor skills:

• Speak clearly to the teacher, other adults and fellow students
• Sing appropriate age-level songs
• Say simple rhymes and poems
• Zip a zipper
• Button a shirt, pants, or coat
• Build with blocks and Legos
• Hold scissors properly
• Cut on a thick, straight line
• Put together simple, larger piece puzzles
• Begin to color within a defined boundary
• Start to print letters
• Begin to cut and glue objects to paper (for example, cut a yellow circle for the sun and paste it to a blue “sky” paper)

Between ages 5 and 7, ideally your child will have developed enough fine motor skills to do these activities:

• Tie shoe and sneaker laces
• Zip her own coat
• Print her name using one capital letter and the rest lowercase
• Have a standard pencil and crayon grip, using the thumb and fingers, not a fist
• Begin to show hand dominance (either left or right)
• Write numbers 0-50, in sequence
• Write partner letters (capital and lowercase, Aa, Bb, etc.)
• Begin to print letters on the lines of lined paper
• Color within the lines of a picture
• Cut out recognizable shapes

Some easy ways to strengthen fine motor skills at home are:

• Have him help you cut out coupons from newspapers or magazines or from ones you print from the Internet
• Roll pieces of clay or modeling compound into long “snakes” and twist to form letters or numbers
• Practice cutting on thicker objects like card stock, thin box tops, or cereal boxes
• Squeeze and count with a soft ball or tennis ball to strengthen hands and fingers

Strong hands, fingers, and lips can help your young child experience early school achievement. Attention to fine motor details helps the progression from understanding a task to successfully completing it.